Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of computerized systems and methods for managing complex processes, such as complex business processes.
Description of the Related Art
Modern corporations and other organizations are often highly complex entities. These organizations often carry out a variety of different processes (e.g. business processes) that may require input from different departments or divisions (e.g. sales, purchasing, planning, manufacturing, finance, etc.). Indeed business organizations often operate in a global marketplace. Such organizations have a need to process a huge amount of operational data, often on an around the clock basis, and often attempt to meet these needs using various automated systems, often referred to as online transaction processing (OLTP) type systems.
Additionally, modern management techniques have found that it is important to have a high degree of operational and process level co-operation between various groups, such as buyers and sellers. However along with such high level of cooperation comes a heightened susceptibility to economic, political and environmental disruptions. Here various types of online analytical processing systems (OLAP) systems have been developed to analyze data according to multiple perspectives.
It has become increasingly important to react quickly to changes, and not be hindered by problems with data flow and management across internal business process boundaries or silos. Here, however, there is a problem because prior art OLTP systems typically do not interact well, if at all, with prior art OLAP systems.
To meet these needs various prior art enterprise resource planning (ERP) computer systems and software applications have been developed by companies such as SAP AG, Oracle, IBM, and the like. These vendors, often assisted by various third-party application packages typically provide computer application software suites intended to serve the needs of these various organizational departments and divisions for business processing and other purposes. However these prior art solutions tend to be inflexible and difficult and expensive to implement.
A new class of OLAP type business intelligence (BI) applications, typified by software vendors such as Tableau, QlikView, Birst, and the like have attempted to address some of the shortcomings of traditional BI tools by offering “self-service”. With these tools the business user directly imports the operational data into the tool and runs their own reporting and analysis. Nonetheless there remains a need for further improvements in business intelligence art.
In general, particularly for business applications, prior art database approaches can be considered to be either online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, or online analytic processing databases (OLAP). The former are often used for more routine operational use, and can operate very quickly, such as on a real-time basis. By contrast the later, such as Business Intelligence (BI), are often used more by managers and executives for longer term planning purposes and are not intended for rapid operation. The two types of databases are generally quite incompatible, thus keeping organizational data into different silos, and making organizational management inefficient.
For both such systems, computing times can be improved by use of various in-memory computing techniques. These are represented by the SAP HANA system, which is described in the 2011 white paper: 50 110 843 (12/01) “SAP HANA™ for Next-Generation Business Applications and Real-Time Analytics”. 
Prior work these areas also includes Abo-Hasna (U.S. Pat. No. 7,647,250), Addala (US patent publication 20120124584), Beckett (PCT/US2003/016967), McGuire (US patent application 20100251264), and Audimoolam (PCT/US2003/015538).